Practice/Application

Practice/Application: The teacher gives the students a chance to practice with the new material and with careful teacher oversight, demonstrate how well they are learning it.

SIOP Feature 20: Hands-on Materials and/or Manipulatives Provided for Students to Practice Using New Content Knowledge

• Activities should be carefully chosen. This component of the SIOP is the best place to differentiate instruction.
• Much planning, should take place to decide the structure, difficulty, grouping, feedback, and expectations of student achievement.
• Activities should include hands-on materials and/or manipulatives.
• Students should be given multiple opportunities to practice the new content knowledge.
• Guided practice should be used, where the teacher leads the student through the practice sessions, prior to independent application.
• Questions to remember when planning:

1. How much material should be practiced at one time?
2. How long in time should a practice period be?
3. How often should students practice?
4. How will students know how well the have done?

• Manipulating learning materials is important for ELs because it helps them connect abstract concepts with concrete experiences.

SIOP Feature 21: Activities Provided for Students to Apply Content and Language Knowledge

• The classes we remember best are the ones in which we applied our new knowledge in meaningful ways.
• Application can occur in a number of ways, such as clustering, using graphic organizers, solving problems in cooperative learning groups, writing a journal, engaging in discussion circles, or a variety of other meaningful activities.
• Opportunities for social interaction promote language development through working with partners, small groups, and "reporting out" information orally.
• Consider students' stages of English language development when deciding to correct language errors. If errors impede communication, you can gently correct them by restating the sentence in correct form. Otherwise, leave the errors alone.

SIOP Feature 22: Activities Integrate All Language Skills

• Reading, writing, listening, and speaking are complex, cognitive language processes that are interrelated and integrated.
• ELs may achieve competence in written language earlier than oral language.
• ELs do not need to be proficient speakers before they start to read and write. Although the relationships among the processes (reading, writing, listening, and speaking) are complex, practice in any one promotes development in others.
• ELs benefit from varied experiences that incorporate reading, promote interactions with others, provide the chance to listen to peers' ideas, and encourage writing about what is being learned.
• Although all identified language objectives in a lesson need to be practiced and applied, not all language skills that are practiced need to be assessed and tied to an objective.

**See page 144 for the Practice/Application component of the SIOP model.

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